Worked at Shopify for over two years and left voluntarily ahead of wave three of mass layoffs. Watched dozens of great people get shafted for cost-cutting. And I am still close with someone who trains our overseas replacements. To be clear, I have zero bones to pick with our peers working overseas, they're also great people. What I have a problem with is Shopify's explosive growth over lockdowns necessitating over-hiring (in their words) and meanwhile the user base nearly tripled over the same period.
They didn't lay people off because the workload eased up. They did it because they reached peak inflection enshittify status. They trimmed thousands of locals, contracted out for pennies on the dollar, and wall street and the enterprise clients now know they're willing to spill blood to thrive. Shopify is now part of the tech cool kids club.
It's not even ironic that they don't want to chip in for the Canadian tax base. They don't need Canada anymore. They're only staying here on paper because our legal system is more forgiving than almost anywhere else. They're laughing, heartily.
In my early twenties I was looking for a field of work that was semi environmentally friendly. I had grown up in southern Alberta where it's all factory farming, mono culture crops, and O&G. For a minute (as a prairie kid) I thought tree planting might be a good way. Basic research even back then showed me that young women who expect to get pregnant within the next fifteen years should not be handling seedlings because the fungicides and pesticides dusted on the root balls are so toxic. Then there's the GMO monoculture of the species of trees they're replanting with.
End of the day I didn't feel like contributing to the next wave of suburb and luxury condo developments. Rednecks always like to say "they grow back" when we talk about protecting old growth forests and it's obvious that trees (individually) can be grown on a given plot of land (like wheat in a season on the plains)... But the conversation ends when we talk about how it takes millennia to grow the type of environmental diversity primal forests have established.
Oh no! Pine Beatles and drought and other things are affecting our crop of trees! Who could've predicted such a thing!?? Bailout please.